Tuesday, April 30, 2013

"The role of mainstream media will primarily become one of an
aggregator, custodian and verifier, a credibility filter that sifts through all
of this data and highlights what is and is not worth reading, understanding and
trusting…” ( p.62, The New Digital Age,)

This makes me think that in the same way these few lines are discussing the way
traditional journalism must become the “aggregators” and “validators” so do not
social media leaders?Twitter links to
many traditional news outlets, and other extremely solid sources of
information. Therefore social media leaders must
chart a course for populations that need to be lead to rich and useful
information.

Health care social media leaders can help patient’s access
useful discussions, forums, lists, blogs, Doctors, important organisations and much more, and therefore we
need to keep finding top notch educators, navigators and curators to help build those bridges for people too access quality information amidst the noise.

If traditional media is being asked to find new ways, so
does new media need to find leaders who operate just like traditional media;
they utilize the ultimate modern landscape but put traditional methods to use
within it?

Thank you so much to everyone who hung out with us last week
during our brainstorm session. Looking back over the transcript what jumps out, and to quote @JBBC ,"
is that this whole idea of developing a buddy mentoring system to help those who are in need of
assistance to navigate social media sites for health care information", has really
resonated with people and has started a really cool and interesting
conversation.

@Mdigitalife tweeted @Naveen101 and myself a few days ago and said “how do we make this real?” ,
I think this is where we need to head next. There was a lot of chat last week
about the start point for #some mentoring, and we agreed that it does have to be
wound all the way back to off line in some cases, as some patients really are
pretty much off line. We talked about mentoring up the platforms, for those already on social media but not getting all the benefits. There was
a lot of interest in what Facebook – Twitter mentoring might look like. We also
asked what about Health care providers? Where is their involvement in all this?
There was a lot of agreement that it was a key factor in on boarding more
patients to social media.

There are so many strands to this
conversation and so many ways to discuss further how we make it “ real” and help bring more patients in to the social media conversation and all it
has to offer them.Next week we want to
take a piece of all of this and keep our objectives for the chat to how can
doctors on board more patients? How do we support peer to peer mentoring?

This week’s chat questions come from the awesome @randy_chalfant, he put these together for us and if we share them now we hope
some of you can start chewing on them before Wednesday.

Q1.Everyone’s needs
are different. What are the keys to identifying each patient’s needs?

Q2. What guidelines need to be developed to deliver
meaningful and individualized support?

Q3. How can we categorize what a doctor and a mentor offer,
to match patient’s individual needs?

Q4. How do we track progress and make adjustments when
necessary

Hopefully we will start moving up a notch from brainstorming
next week, and if you missed last week go check out #hcsmbm so ya
can get up to speed before Wednesday. If you get any ideas before Wednesday throw them out
and use the hash tag!

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

We are advocates because we feel passionately about
something, and we use our voices to try and help get stuff done. There is so
little being done that every single one of our voices is as valuable as the next
persons, and believe me there is more than enough room for every single voice, in fact
we have so much room we could rent out places in the cancer community for
advocates voices.

What gets me and that is why I am sharing this today is that
an advocates voice is a sacred voice and it should never be made to feel by
anyone or any other organisation like it is doing the wrong thing, not saying
the right thing or just not asvaluable as what they have to offer.

We are not in the school yard anymore. I have worked in environments that looking
back on it now my hair stands on end. There was a job I had not so long ago and
I still can’t think about what happened without wincing. But they were jobs…jobs
I didn’t feel that passionately about either, and hey who doesn’t run up
against quite a bit of sh## in their working life at some point or another.

This is different though. The work we do as advocates is so
important. It is so valuable and it is also important that we feel
comfortable and free in the space so we can do our best work. I am still
reading Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In at the moment and she talks about women ditching the
Queen Bee mentality, she asks us as women to stop thinking there has to just be
one woman on top to get anything done in thisworld, we need to start thinking about a hive,
a busy hive full of productive equals empowering one another.

Taking gender out of it, this actually counts for all of us
male and female, and there is a no more important time to make sure we shape our thinking like this,
when we look at our work in the cancer community. We need to have a hive
mentality. There is so much to do and every thought, contribution, word, action
and voice counts - equally.

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About Me

We are LIVESTRONG Leaders based in France and the U.K, we create connections and collaborate with people and organisations as part of a volunteer network helping LIVESTRONG in what they do best - Listening, engaging, navigating and advocating for the Global Cancer Community.
The LIVESTRONG Foundation have been working to improve the lives of people affected by Cancer since 1997 with their programs and initiatives.They are a non profit organization and have raised close to $500 million to help and empower the world wide cancer community.